Ivara Quill leaned her left hip against the stone railing of the northeastern turret, resting the brass barrel of her surveying telescope across the granite coping. Her single right hand held the knurled focus ring, adjusting the thread until the distant ridgeline snapped into sharp, flint-gray focus. Above that ridge. There, the black dome of Morn’s sky shield had hung for four thousand three hundred and eighty nights, the sky was a deep, frozen navy, clean and see-through.
And scattered across that navy expanse were the stars.
“The Plow,” she murmured under her breath. Her voice barely carried over the whistling mountain gale. “The Hunter’s Belt. The Broken Wheel.”
She hadn’t seen them since she was twenty-two years old, an apprentice land-mapper carrying leveling rods through the high summer pastures above the timberline. For twelve years, Rookvale’s night had been an indoor night. An engineered ceiling of warm, high-pressure soot, sulfur vapor, and humming copper cables that hovered only eight hundred feet above the town chimney pots. It had smelled of ozone, burnt animal fat, scorched machine oil, and boiled cabbage. It had trapped every cough, every heavy-duty discharge, and every despairing breath within a stuffy stone bowl.
This sky smelled of ancient ice, dry granite, and vast, clean distances.
